Look good, feel good Well­ness and beauty

Fish is a nu­tri­tional su­per­star and is one of the most com­monly served in­gre­di­ents in tra­di­tional Pa­pua New Guinean dishes, which are also filled with plant-based foods such as the sweet potato-like kaukau, fresh greens and bread made of sago palm flour.

While fish is linked to dozens of health ben­e­fits – from im­prov­ing mood to main­tain­ing eye­sight – lat­est re­search shows its abil­ity to also re­duce the painful symp­toms of rheuma­toid arthri­tis. This is es­pe­cially good news con­sid­er­ing the con­di­tion is on the rise in PNG.

Re­search by the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Rheuma­tol­ogy found that peo­ple with rheuma­toid arthri­tis who eat fish twice a week suf­fer far less from swollen and ten­der joints than peo­ple who never eat fish, or only en­joy it once a month.

Step­ping up fish con­sump­tion to more than twice a week leads to pro­por­tion­ally less arthritic symp­toms, ac­cord­ing to the re­sults re­ported in the lat­est edi­tion of the Arthri­tis Care & Re­search jour­nal pub­lished by the col­lege.

Even if you don’t have arthri­tis, fish can help you feel a lot bet­ter. One of the world’s best sources of brain-friendly omega-3 fatty acids and en­ergy-boost­ing pro­tein, pre­vi­ous sci­en­tific stud­ies have found reg­u­larly en­joy­ing fish can lead to lower rates of heart dis­ease, stroke and de­pres­sion, helps pre­vent mac­u­lar de­gen­er­a­tion, and pro­motes bet­ter sleep thanks to the high vi­ta­min D con­tent. In chil­dren, fish con­sump­tion re­duces the risk of type one di­a­betes and is linked to a 24 per cent lower chance of de­vel­op­ing asthma.

All this means you can en­joy PNG’s many seafood dishes with a clear con­science, in­clud­ing one of the South Pa­cific’s most­loved, Kokoda fish. Made of mar­i­nated raw fish, it also just hap­pens to be one of the eas­i­est dishes to pre­pare at home.